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Fox-y Lady

Julianne Moore is a marvellous actress. “The Big Lebowski,” “The Kids Are All Right,” “Vanya on 42nd Street,” “Boogie Nights,” “Far from Heaven,” “A Single Man,” “The Hours”—she was terrific in them all, and in many more besides. And there’s nothing wrong with her performance in HBO’s “Game Change.” She does a fine Palin impression, as good as Tina Fey’s—better, really, because more nuanced.

But the truth is, no one plays Sarah Palin like Sarah Palin. No one can. I realize that the rules of attraction are a little different for everyone. The mysteries of eros are treacherously subjective. That said, what Palin had, and what Moore couldn’t quite nail, was an ineffable—and, apparently, inimitable—sexiness.

I’ve glimpsed the former half-term governor a couple of times lately in her post-gubernatorial habitat at Fox News, and I regret to say that the past couple of years have not been entirely kind to her (the same can be said of many of us). But in 2008, 2009, and 2010 she was about as beautiful as a woman can be and still be a person of manifestly bad character. (I’m talking about skin-deep beauty, of course, not “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” beauty.) The tempestuous Alaskan’s tousled pile of hair, her liquid eyes and stylish glasses, her childlike window-washing hand wave, her (to my ears) musical voice, her lips . Uh, oh. The point is, I’m sure I wasn’t the only man, even the only male Democrat, who was mesmerized by her corporeal and sonic affect. (A side note: most of the women I know found her looks unexceptionable—a well-groomed suburban matron, but hardly a knockout. And to the extent that this was how women in general saw her, it was a political plus.)

In “Game Change,” Julianne Moore gets the feral ambition, the small-mindedness, the catatonic depression lurking beneath the public perkiness. But she doesn’t quite get the flirtatiousness, the seductiveness, the juiciness—the magic.

“The question of why McCain chose Palin,” our Amy Davidson wrote after seeing the movie, “is, ultimately, much less interesting than why he didn’t choose [Senator Kay Bailey] Hutchison or any others. There were really no qualified Republican women?”

Sure there were. Hutchison, for example. But the vetting of the Veep, one gathers, consisted of little more than googly-eyed Googling. In the movie, as Amy notes, when the actor playing McCain campaign manager Rick Davis gets a load of Palin on a Web video, “his jaw actually drops. And Schmidt, summoned over, declares her a star.” Schwing! Double schwing!

But it was nerdy conservative intellectuals, not macho Republican campaign buccaneers, who fell hard first. Jane Mayer has described how editors of the right’s two most prestigious opinion journals went all swoony when luxury cruises took them to Fairbanks Juneau in the summer of 2007.

Fred Barnes [of The Weekly Standard] recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

That sums it up nicely. The men thought she was pretty. The other stuff—the hockey-mom thing, the Christianist piety, the rugged husband and numerous kids, the anti-establishment reputation, the mooseburgers—was a bonus. But none of it would have sealed the deal if it hadn’t come wrapped in a pretty package.

Barnes’s Standard colleague William Kristol was so dazzled that no sooner was he back in Washington than he went on Fox News and proclaimed Palin “my heartthrob.” Also:

Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at National Review, had a more elemental response. In an online column, he described Palin as “a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too. Am I allowed to say that? Probably not, but too bad.”

Too bad, indeed. The G.O.P.’s relationship with Sarah Palin was a wild crush, not a solid Christian marriage. It was a classic case of adolescent infatuation. It was matter over mind. It was flesh and the devil over spirit and the angels. The episode has many lessons, only one of which is that as political strategy, puppy love is no better than strapping dogs to the roofs of station wagons.

Photograph by Roberto Gonzalez/Getty Images.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.